Proof of a Hungry Body

I am proof that a body can be loved untouched I still don't know how a body can ache for a presence it has never touched—

beneath the turquoise Gulf waters, how it pulses, trembles in the bed of anticipation, like leaves summoned by the wind in haste to crush. A mouth it has never borrowed air from.

The surrender to a stranger's kiss, the sips that settle, and what it means to live in the lips of another. In that desert heat, something is stored between two souls far apart. I feel it— the quiver, the sigh, the imagined weight of you in a kitchen, my hands held behind my back, soap slipping from the loofah to the floor. I felt the surge, how it leans, how it melts, how a head is drawn toward mine, nose pressing nose, skin grazing places in need of tending.

There has never been anything like that. How a voice alone can undo me. How I can yearn for what carries the capacity to destroy me and yearn anyway— bodies colliding like plates in a dance, whispers that admit we are dangerous to each other. It is the same shame a bee knows after mating, seeking death because nothing rivals the sweetness of being wanted.

To be looked at and know: this is my fate, and I tether guilty. I am proof that a body can be loved untouched, fulfilled by its own hands in the thought of a lover. There is no covenant imagination cannot break, no echo it cannot summon.

That feeling existed with Harry— in dreams of holding him, of turning myself toward his eyes, meeting fire with sound. I cheered promises I knew were bugs released to organise chaos. The spikes along my neck remember him, his voice, the way he offers mercy to my name as though I carry a deliverance he refuses to exorcise.

The way he recites desire with his eyes— dark, witty eyes I never get to see fully. His smile announces its intent to my chest, and I imagine a kiss: our bodies uprooting each other in a private dig. From the screen, our energies rehearse belief over the rooftops of Qatar— a pulse unknown to mankind.